For typical print job processing, when a user has a very long print job, and several short print jobs, once the long job is submitted; all raster image processing (RIP) resources are consumed by long job, until the long job is complete. The several short jobs are left queued, but could easily have RIPped and printed during the time that the long job was RIPped, with minimal impact on the RIP time or print time of the long job. Since the short jobs may arrive after the long job is already being processed, the user or operator is prohibited from re-ordering or re-prioritizing jobs to ensure that long jobs run when there are no short jobs. One mechanism already available is an “interrupt job” mechanism, wherein the operator can hold all jobs not yet in RIP, suspend the job currently RIPping, and then release any short jobs. This is an all-or-nothing approach requiring excessive manual intervention. Furthermore, no provision is currently made for driving multiple independent jobs to separate printers.
Published US patent application number 20040196496 describes a page or “chunk” parallel printing system. The system comprises a printer, a plurality of processing nodes, each processing node being disposed for processing a portion of a print job into a printer dependant format, and a processing manager for spooling the print job into selectively sized chunks and assigning the chunks to selected ones of the nodes for parallel processing of the chunks by the processing nodes into the printer dependant format. The chunks are selectively sized from at least one page to an entire size of the print job in accordance with predetermined splitting factors for enhancing page processing efficiency. The system further comprises a supervisor processor for estimating the work time required to process a chunk based upon selected data determined from the splitting of the print job and for load balancing the print jobs across the processing nodes. Further background information for the present disclosure can be found in US patent publication number 20040197124 describing an idiom recognizing document splitter; US patent publication number 20040196498 describing a parallel printing system having modes for auto-recovery, auto-discovery of resources, and parallel processing of unprotected postscript jobs; and, US patent publication number 20040196497 describing a parallel printing system having flow control in a virtual disk transfer system. Patent publications 20040196496, 20040197124, 20040196498, and 20040196497 are incorporated by reference as background information.